Techmeme, summing up Elizabeth Rembert’s Bloomberg story on the National Student Clearinghouse’s preliminary numbers:
US computer science enrollment fell 12%+ for undergrads and 10%+ for grad students this fall, as AI reduces coding jobs.
Stack Overflow, where you’d take your questions once you got in, is going quiet too. Frank Chu counted with the Stack Exchange API: 969 new questions in September.
A 99.3% drop from October 2020. Read that again. The site that defined “Google the error message” now produces, in a month, roughly what it once produced in a few hours.
Fewer people learning to program, and the ones who are have stopped asking each other.
So it’s nice to see Geoff Graham go the other way. He’s been writing for CSS-Tricks for 12 years. DigitalOcean bought it from Chris Coyier in 2022, and as of this week:
CSS-Tricks is an independent site once again!
He isn’t taking it on to coast, either. The plan is a beginner’s HTML/CSS course, the newsletter coming back, and the guest writing form reopening:
This place has traditionally been for folks who know what they’re doing. But I’m truly committed to creating more entry points for those getting started, particularly as our field is in the early throes of a growing skills gap.
And: “I do believe that learning the basics is more important now than ever.” Me too.